Product visualization startup Cylindo has raised $1 million in new funding.
CEO Janus Jagd told me the company emerged from his own struggles moving into a new apartment, where he and his girlfriend wanted to visualize how their living room would look with a bunch of new furniture. To do that, Jagd said he built a 3D room model on his own and gave it to furniture merchants. Read More

Finland’s Jolla, the plucky startup that’s built its own mobile OS, called Sailfish, atop the Mer open source project, is showing off its forthcoming, crowdsourced tablet here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It’s the follow up to Jolla’s first device, the eponymous Jolla smartphone, which was released at the end of 2013. Read More

No matter how far or close by, a good friend of mine always texts to say he’s “20 minutes away” when he’s running late. SeeYoo, which calls itself a ‘pre-meeting app’, is almost certainly not for him. Read More

The Barcelona Meet Up is tomorrow! Huzzah! If you’ve purchased tickets already, good for you. They are a rare commodity. If you haven’t then you’re kind of out of luck because the event is sold out. Remember, you must have an official Eventbrite ticket to join us.
If you do not have an Eventbrite ticket you are not registered. If you simply added your name to the original… Read More

Meet Wisemetrics, a social media campaign optimization tool to make your posts as efficient as possible. A few weeks ago, Facebook launched the relevance score, meaning that good advertisers now pay less than others. This way, Facebook can increase the average quality of ads on its social network.
Wisemetrics quickly realized that there was a big opportunity. Its new advertising… Read More

Sitting somewhere between an e-commerce subscription service like Birchbox and a ‘personal shopper’ or stylist, Berlin-based startup Outfittery offers what it calls a curated shopping service for men’s clothing.
After signing up, you simply answer a few questions about your clothing style and sizes, and one of the company’s style experts gives you a call to further… Read More

Another security-focused development in the European mobile space: Finnish mobile startup Jolla, which develops the Sailfish mobile OS and its own brand mobile hardware, has just announced it will be partnering to create a “security hardened” version of the platform, called Sailfish Secure. Read More

A sequel to last year’s pro-privacy Android smartphone Blackphone has just been announced, here at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, along with a tablet device, called Blackphone+. Read More

PhotoMath is a nifty little app. You point your phone camera at a math equation, and it will give you the answer and show you all the steps to solve this particular equation. Following its huge success in the App Store, the app is coming to Android.
When I first played with PhotoMath before the team took the stage in our Battlefield competition at Disrupt London, I was impressed by its design… Read More

LeadDesk, the Finland-based cloud call center software company, has announced its first funding led by Dawn Capital with participation from public fund, Finnish Industry Investment. This investment round is designed to drive LeadDesk’s growth in European markets with particular focus on UK/Ireland, Spain, and the Benelux region.
If you have not heard of them before it’s because… Read More

Encrypted comms company Silent Circle, one half of the SGP Technologies joint venture behind the pro-privacy Android smartphone Blackphone, has just announced it’s reached an agreement to buy out its hardware partner, Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone. Read More

We’re less than a week away from the Pitch-Off in Barcelona and we’re excited to see you. If you’ve purchased tickets already, good for you. They are a rare commodity. If you haven’t then you’re kind of out of luck because the event is sold out. Special dispensations may be made if you contact us but I doubt we can help.
If you didn’t make pitch-off the cut… Read More

United we stand, divided we fall. So goes the old saying that search and mobile giant Google is now taking to heart in Europe, as it faces off with regulators and rivals in the region. The company is merging its European regional and product operations into a single unit, to be led by Matt Brittin, formerly the head of Google’s operations in northern and western Europe, who now… Read More

While IBM is number-one when it comes to the number of patents filed in the U.S., in Europe, Samsung is leading the pack. Today, the European Patent Office released 2014 figures for patents filed in the region, which showed that the Korean company, and currently the world’s largest smartphone maker, filed 2,541 for the full year. In terms of countries, the U.S. dominated the list… Read More

As Airbnb continues to work through negotiations with hotel and housing regulators in some markets, it’s not wasting any time in building out its footprint globally. The accommodation rental juggernaut is partnering with T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom to preinstall its app in Android smartphones sold across 13 markets in Europe, including DT’s home market of Germany. Those… Read More

Leipzig, Germany-based Webdata Solutions is another startup playing in the retail intelligence space. The company, founded in 2012 as a spin-off from a Leipzig University research project, provides a big data-based service, called Blackbee, that crawls the web in real-time to enable retailers and manufacturers to keep a better tab on competitors and take action accordingly. Read More

More signs that security is rising up the investment agenda: another security-focused accelerator program has launched, hoping to put a clutch of security startups through their paces — this one with backing from veteran security firm Kaspersky Labs, via its educational arm Kaspersky Academy. Read More

More unravelling for Wonga, the UK-based online lender that last year had to write down £220 million ($340 million) in unpaid loans. The company announced today that it would lay off 325 staff, and it has also sold Everline, its small-business lending arm, to Orange Money (trading as Ezbob). On top of that, former Wonga chairman Robin Klein of Index Ventures has stepped down from the board… Read More

No one is going to take an Uber from London to Naples. And, fortunately, they don’t have to. U.K.-based pan-European train travel startup Loco2 has integrated its sixth European rail booking system, signing up the Italian national rail operator Trenitalia. Read More